Once again about the "permafrost"

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Readers sent a video with another theory about the origin of "permafrost". This topic also haunts me for a long time, since the available facts in no way agree with the proposed theories. Therefore, I decided to systematize the available information at least a little in order to justify the inconsistency of at least some of the proposed versions.

To begin with, let's list the basic facts about permafrost, which are more or less reliable and have been repeatedly confirmed:

1. The depth of soil freezing can reach 900 meters (there is a mention of the depth of permafrost up to 1200 meters).

2. The largest area covered with permafrost is in Siberia. Also, there are permafrost zones in North America. But in the Southern Hemisphere, with the exception of Antarctica, there are no permafrost zones. In this case, I do not consider high-altitude regions, for example, the Himalayas or the Andes, where there are also frozen soil areas, but there the reason for their formation is quite understandable and does not raise any special questions.

3. Permafrost is gradually thawing and the area it covers is constantly decreasing both in Siberia and in North America.

4. There are numerous finds of animal corpses that were frozen in permafrost and are now thawed. At the same time, some of the found corpses are quite well preserved. There are also finds of corpses in which the remains of undigested food were found inside the digestive system, or the same corpses of mammoths with grass in their mouths.

5. Local peoples used meat from the thawed carcasses of animals, including mammoths, as food for themselves or for their dogs.

Now let's consider the official version of the origin of permafrost. It is argued that these are the consequences of the so-called "ice ages", when the Earth experienced a cooling and a decrease in average annual temperatures to significantly lower values than now. For the soil to begin to freeze, the average annual temperature must be below 0 degrees. The age of the permafrost in some areas is estimated at 1-1.5 million years, but it is generally argued that the last serious cold snap, which formed the modern contours of permafrost, was about 10 thousand years ago.

Why are we talking about millions of years? But because there are concepts such as heat capacity and thermal conductivity of a substance. Even if you sharply cool the surface to absolute zero, a large mass of matter will not be able to immediately cool down throughout the entire volume. In the already mentioned article about permafrost there is a table "Freezing depth at average negative temperatures during", from which it follows that for freezing to a depth of 687, 7 meters, the average annual temperature must be below 0 degrees Celsius for 775 thousand years. By the way, such a duration of the "ice age" in itself already puts an end to the official version, since there are no other facts that would confirm that there was such a long ice age on Earth. Most likely, this tale was invented just in order to somehow explain the reasons for the appearance of permafrost at great depths.

But we also have found corpses of animals, which are not only well preserved. The presence of undigested food debris, not only in the digestive system, but also in the mouth, suggests that they froze very quickly. That is, it was not a gradual cooling, when the winter was getting longer and the summer is getting shorter. If the same mammoths were frozen in winter frosts, then they could not have any grass in their mouths.

The second important point is that the found corpses do not show signs of decay before thawing. It is for this reason that the meat from these corpses can be used for food. But this means that after freezing, these corpses were never thawed again! Otherwise, in the very first summer, regardless of its duration, the thawed corpses should have begun to decompose. This fact alone proves that the cooling was catastrophic and has nothing to do with cyclical temperature changes depending on the season.

The fact that meat from the corpses of frozen animals is edible also suggests that it has not been in the permafrost for tens of thousands of years, as they are trying to convince us. The catastrophe that froze mammoths happened relatively recently, from 300 to 500 years ago. The trick here is that even when frozen, meat and other organic tissues still lose their properties and change. The fact that microorganisms cannot develop in this meat due to low temperatures does not mean that the protein molecules themselves will not be destroyed under the influence of time and low temperatures.

What other options do we have?

Supporters of the "Dzhanibekov effect", which supposedly should have caused either a revolution of the Earth or its partial displacement from the initial state, put forward a version according to which an inertial wave, which, in the event of a twisting of the Earth's crust, should have rolled across the continents, carried the so-called methane hydrates onto land … The peculiarity of these compounds is that they are stable only at high pressure, which is present at great depths in the oceans. If they are raised to the surface, then they begin to intensively decompose into their constituent gas and water with intense heat absorption.

Without touching on the "Dzhanibekov effect" itself, let's consider the methane hydrate version of the formation of permafrost.

If by an inertial wave such a quantity of methane hydrates was thrown onto the mainland, which during decomposition was capable of forming permafrost on such a huge territory, then where is the methane that was released during their decomposition ?! Its percentage in the atmosphere should not only be large, but very large. In fact, the content of methane in the atmosphere is only about 0.0002%.

In addition, the ingress of methane hydrates onto the surface of continents and their subsequent decomposition does not explain the freezing of the soil to a great depth. This process was catastrophic, which means it was fast and should have been completed in a few days, at most weeks. During this time, the soil simply physically would not have time to freeze to the depth that we actually observe.

I also have great doubts that methane hydrates could have been transported by water to the interior of the continent over a long distance. The fact is that the decomposition of methane hydrates begins not when they are on land, but when the external pressure decreases. Therefore, they should have begun to decompose in the ocean, when they were in the upper layers of water. As a result, the water containing the methane hydrates had to freeze in shallow water near the coast even before it could carry the undecomposed methane hydrates inland. As a result, we should have got ice walls along the coasts of the ocean, and not permafrost far in the center of Siberia.

Another version of the formation of permafrost was put forward by Oleg Pavlyuchenko in the video “THE SCARY Mystery of Permafrost. THREE Poles TWO Flood."

According to his version, the cause of the permafrost is the consequences after the collision of the Earth with one of the supposedly existing additional satellites of the Earth in addition to today's Moon. At the place of the collision, the Earth's atmosphere was squeezed out to the sides and "the cosmic cold poured into the formed funnel."

Again, at the moment we are not considering the consistency of the very version of three satellites and the destruction of two of them, which is being promoted by Oleg Pavlyuchenko, in the end a collision could occur with an object that was not a satellite of the Earth, especially since this is the option I am considering in his work "Another History of the Earth". Let's find out if the process proposed by Oleg is possible from a physical point of view?

To begin with, it should be said that heat can be given off by the body either in the form of thermal radiation into the environment, or through direct contact of a hot substance with a cold one. Moreover, the greater the heat capacity of the cold substance, the more heat it can take from the hot one. And the higher the thermal conductivity, the faster this process will take place. So, if, for some reason, a "funnel" forms in the Earth's atmosphere, then nothing from space can "rush" there, because in space we observe space vacuum, that is, almost complete absence of substance. Therefore, the cooling of the Earth in this case will proceed only due to thermal radiation from the surface. The biggest problem in the design of spacecraft is precisely their efficient cooling, since classical refrigeration units based on the principle of a heat pump in a vacuum simply do not work.

The second problem faced by the proposed version is exactly the same as in the case of the release of methane hydrates to the surface of the continent. The time during which such a "funnel" will exist will be very, very short. That is, the soil simply will not have time to freeze to the required depth during this time. And this is not counting the fact that during a collision with a large space object at the collision site, a huge amount of heat from the impact should have been released.

In the commentary under this video, I tried to suggest another version. Its essence is that the collision could occur not with a solid space object, but with a huge comet, which consisted of frozen gas, such as nitrogen. Why exactly nitrogen? But because it must be one of the gases, which is already abundant in the atmosphere. Otherwise, we should have observed the presence of this gas in the atmosphere now. And in the case of nitrogen, which is already 78% in the atmosphere, its amount will increase by fractions of a percent.

It is also undoubted that part of the matter of the fallen object should have evaporated when it collided with the Earth's surface. But it all depends on the trajectory of the collision and the size of the object. If the objects did not collide head-on, but approached at a relatively low speed on almost parallel trajectories, and the comet was large enough, then the collision force would be insufficient to evaporate all the comet matter at the moment of impact. Therefore, the volume of the comet's matter that did not evaporate at the moment of impact, had to first melt, turning into liquid nitrogen and the flood of a sufficiently large area. It should be remembered that the melting point of nitrogen is -209, 86 degrees Celsius. And then, with further heating to -195, 75, boil off and go into a gaseous state.

At that time, this version seemed to me quite convincing, but now, as I study the topic, I understand that it is also untenable. First, liquid nitrogen has a very low heat capacity, as well as the specific heat of melting and boiling. That is, relatively little heat is required to melt and then evaporate the frozen nitrogen. Therefore, a huge amount of frozen nitrogen would be required to freeze a soil layer of several hundred meters over a sufficiently large area. But we do not know of such huge gas comets. And in general it is not a fact that such objects can exist. In addition, a collision with such an object should have caused much more severe consequences than just permafrost, and leave clearly visible traces of the collision on the Earth's surface.

And secondly, we have the same problem that we have already identified in previous versions. The time during which the cooled comet matter could affect the Earth's surface was too short to have time to freeze the soil to an observed depth of almost a kilometer.

While looking through the materials on this topic again, I unexpectedly came across a fragment, thanks to which a new hypothesis of the formation of permafrost was born. Here's this snippet:

“In the 1940s, Soviet scientists hypothesized the presence of gas hydrate deposits in the permafrost zone (Strizhov, Mokhnatkin, Chersky). In the 1960s, they also discovered the first deposits of gas hydrates in the north of the USSR. At the same time, the possibility of the formation and existence of hydrates in natural conditions finds laboratory confirmation (Makogon).

From this point on, gas hydrates are considered as a potential fuel source. According to various estimates, the reserves of terrestrial hydrocarbons in hydrates range from 1, 8 · 105 to 7, 6 · 109 km³ [2]. Their wide distribution in the oceans and permafrost zones of the continents, instability with increasing temperature and decreasing pressure is revealed.

In 1969, the development of the Messoyakhskoye field began in Siberia, where it is believed that for the first time it was possible (by pure chance) to extract natural gas directly from hydrates (up to 36% of the total production volume as of 1990)"

Thus, the fact that there are significant volumes of methane hydrates in the bowels of the Earth is an established scientific fact that is of very great practical importance. If we had a planetary catastrophe that caused the deformation of the Earth's crust and the formation of faults and internal voids inside it, then this should have led to a drop in pressure, and therefore to the start of the process of decomposition of methane hydrate deposits inside the Earth. As a result of this process, methane, as well as water, should have been released in a large volume.

Do we have underground reserves of methane? Oh sure! We have been pumping them for many years and selling them to the West in Yamal, and just in the permafrost region, almost in its epicenter.

Do we have frozen volumes of water inside the Earth? It turns out there is too! We read:

« Cryolithozone - the upper layer of the earth's crust, characterized by a negative temperature of rocks and soils and the presence or possibility of the existence of underground ice.

The term “cryolithozone” itself indicates that the main rock-forming mineral in it is ice (in the form of layers, veins), as well as ice-cement, “binding” loose sedimentary rocks.

The maximum permafrost thickness (820 m) was most reliably established in the late 1980s at the Andylakh gas condensate field. S. A. Berkovchenko within the Vilyui syneclise carried out regional work - direct temperature measurements in a significant number of wells, many of which were not operated for more than 10 years (suspended "standing" exploration wells filled immediately after drilling with diesel fuel or calcium chloride solution, restored temperature regime)"

True, at the end the "officials" could not resist and attributed: "The cryolithozone is, in all likelihood, a product of significant Pleistocene cooling of the climate in the Northern Hemisphere." The idea that these are the consequences of the decomposition of methane hydrates, which are present in quantity in the same place, for some reason does not occur to them.

This version has one more important plus. It explains well why permafrost reaches great depths and how it could happen in a very short time. In fact, everything is very simple! There was no "freezing from the surface inward." The decomposition of methane hydrates, and hence the freezing of the soil, proceeded immediately along the entire depth at the same time. Moreover, I fully admit the option in which, at the time of the catastrophe, the permafrost was formed precisely at a depth, in the thickness of the Earth, and came to the surface not at the time of the catastrophe, but after a while, freezing everything around. Now there is a gradual process of recovery and thawing, in which the frozen area gradually shifts upward and decreases in area. Moreover, the further, the faster this process will go. But the most interesting thing will begin when this process is finally completed, since now the permafrost region makes a significant contribution to the overall temperature balance in the Northern Hemisphere, since it takes a lot of heat to heat it. And it is Russia that will receive the most benefits from the complete disappearance of permafrost, since we will get huge areas that will become usable. Indeed, now permafrost occupies more than 60% of the territory of Russia.